Tuesday, December 05, 2017

New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said that the baseball association should bear the brunt of the blame for letting Taiwanese players become political tools in China’s “united front” strategy and for giving Chinese media an opportunity to promote the “both sides of the Strait are one family” view without restraint.

China is not a top-tier nation in baseball and positive effects on Taiwanese baseball from the tournament would be limited, Hsu said.

The onus moved from learning the game’s codes and secret handshakes to understanding spreadsheets and numbers.

(An extreme example of this is an Azerbaijani soccer team, FC Baku. Five years ago, it hired a 21-year-old to run its player-acquisition set-up. His chief competency? Being very good at the video game Football Manager.)

The effect of metrics on hiring has been slowly (and now rapidly) trickling down. A manager is no longer a teacher. He doesn’t need an intimate knowledge of the ...

With the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes recently picking up some serious steam, a source close to the situation has now informed FanRag Sports that the Japanese phenom has narrowed down his list of potential suitors to seven teams. Ohtani is still considering the Seattle Mariners, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Angels, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers and Chicago Cubs.

George Stallings, manager of the Boston Braves, attended the state fair in Macon, Ga., recently and carried off ten prizes with the Shorthorn cattle from his Haddock plantation. On the way home from the fair Stallings was arrested for speeding and was fined $25.

Saturday, December 02, 2017

Mike Petriello follows this section with some hopeful numbers from Statcast. Of course, he will be 35 next year with a bad back.

In 2017, Miguel Cabrera had the least productive year of a near-certain Hall of of Fame career, though by his lofty standards, even his “least productive year” isn’t that bad. His .249/.329/.399 line, when framed through park-adjusted metrics, was just nine percentage points worse than league average.

Let’s be honest, the whole process is a complete mystery. Here we are debating the merits of adding a $295-million slugger, trying to determine how much – if at all – such a move would improve the Dodgers.

Meanwhile, there’s no arguing that this team’s batting order became decidedly more whole this summer when $535,000 Chris Taylor was moved to the leadoff spot.

Ridiculous? Sure, but if baseball made sense, there’d never be a day when Derek Jeter would be leading the Marlins and ...

Will players support a system where their top salaries are effectively capped?

Scott Boras said during the 2015 offseason that revenues had dropped to 43% when including MLBAM revenue — about a 10-point difference from MLB’s numbers. Boras knows how efficiently teams are being run, as he has developed a practice in recent years of doing an end-around of front offices and appealing directly to ownership.

If the issue is the messenger, I’ve got no issue with the complaints. As annoying as Morgan was announcing baseball games, he was fifty times more annoying than that in person. He acted like he had his own personal caste system, with himself at the top, other ballplaying greats next, people who could help him after that and the rest of us lower than the dirt he played on. There are a few other arrogant former players, but he was the king of arrogance.

Nice to see the Captain bringing class to his new franchise. Just. Wow.

Marty Scott, who joined the Marlins as a vice president in 2011 and in recent years had worked as a scout, said he was told his contract would not be renewed Oct. 16 while at the Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida, where doctors three days earlier had removed a cancerous tumor and polyps from his colon. Doctors initially found the cancer in late August as Scott underwent a battery of tests in preparation for a kidney ...

Great scores come in many forms, but they’re not all created equal. If you hit 700 on verbal and math, the resulting 1,400 will qualify you for some pretty good schools. That same 1,400 might get you into MIT, however, if 800 of it comes via math, or Amherst if you similarly crush the verbal.

There’s more to college admissions than test scores, and yeah, yeah, most MIT and Amherst grads aced both halves of the SAT, but for the purposes of this exercise, which student ...

Ed Bang, the well-known baseball critic, of Cleveland, advocates as a solution of existing major league troubles a merger of the National and American circuits.
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The proposition contemplates one club for each of the following cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis.

Harper, scheduled for free agency after the upcoming 2018 season, is batting 1.000 when it comes to getting fans to read into each and every move he makes, hoping that everything he does has some sort of hidden clue about where he wants to sign his next gargantuan contract.

And of course Cubs fans are hoping it all means he’s coming to the North Side.

Frank B. Gilbreth, an efficiency expert of Providence, R.I., recently made some tests as to the speed of a thrown ball. The results of these tests show that the average speed attained by a fast pitcher is about 2.4 miles per minute.
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Gilbreth found some exceptionally fast pitchers, who delivered a ball at the rate of 2.88 miles per minute.

Jeff Passan, former Hall of Fame voter, gives some reasons for the slow start to the free agent period.

“Shohei Ohtani,” one agent said, “is like the baseball version of the new Amazon headquarters.”

He is, according to people around the game, a lot of things. A staggering talent, capable of throwing a ball 102 mph from the right side and hitting it like a leviathan from the left side and running with the speed of Mike Trout despite standing 6-foot-5 and 230 pounds. A complete mystery, ...

I know having respect for differences of opinion isn’t in vogue. Although I disagree strongly and find flaws in his logic, I don’t have a problem with the expression of his opinion.

Morgan’s letter was polite, but to the point. Agree or disagree, it was Morgan’s right to speak his mind, just like anyone else. Will his presentation impact the voting? It could, particularly if a voter is uncertain of his stance on the issue.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

“I think we have as good a chance to sign him long-term as anybody in baseball,” Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo said on MLB Network this week. “He’s the type of iconic, historic type of player that would love to be with the same organization throughout his whole career, such as [Derek] Jeter and that group of guys. I think he wants to be here. We want him here. I think there’s an opportunity for him to make history here.”

There are worse things than living in Miami and making millions of dollars playing baseball. I’d say Stanton has hand, not the Marlins.

According to two sources with knowledge of discussions, the Marlins informed Stanton in October that if he refused to waive his no-trade rights and accept a trade, he would remain a Marlin and team officials would look to trade off other top players to reduce payroll.

While it wasn’t presented to Stanton as an ultimatum, one source said, it shows that the ...